this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
143 points (99.3% liked)

Programming

26392 readers
181 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
UlrikHD@programming.dev
bugsmith@programming.dev
Spyro@programming.dev
143
Your Engineers Aren't Lazy, Your Codebase Is Punishing Them (piechowski.io)
submitted 5 days ago by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
61 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] csolisr@hub.azkware.net 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I once was working on a code base where the final solution to their technical debt was to... switch to another tool entirely and decommission the old one. It was cheaper, and faster, than basically rewriting the app to upgrade to a supported version of the libraries.

[–] codeinabox@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Your comment reminded me of this article, The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address, which discusses the lack of technical leadership when it comes to tackling technical debt, and that the solution is usually a rewrite.

Instead, most organisations don’t tackle technical debt until it causes an operational meltdown. At that point, they end up allocating 30–40% of their budget to massive emergency transformation programmes—double the recommended preventive investment (Oliver Wyman, 2024).